Mouth gestures in Kata Kolok

Kata Kolok is a rural signing variety that has emerged in response to a sudden rise in the incidence of deafness in a village community of Bali. The language has been used by five subsequent generations of deaf individuals in all aspects of village live: social interaction, politics, farming activities, lithurgy, and deaf education. There are at present 46 deaf individuals of all age groups, who use this indigenous signing variety with their hearing relatives, colleagues and friends. These hearing signers make up the vast majority of sign language users and use the sign language with varying degrees of proficiency. While the language has been in close cross-modal contact with the spoken language of the wider hearing community since its incipience, there is limited evidence of contact-induced features such as initialisation of signs, or the use of mouthings reflecting Balinese. This paper is based on the analysis of 4.5 hours of transcribed video data of spontaneous interactions among deaf Kata Kolok signers from the third and fourth generations. The data set is part of a larger corpus that was collected during fieldwork activities between 2007 and 2013. I discuss the use of mouth movements at various levels of language structure in terms of their distributional properties. First, I discuss the grammatical use of a lip smack for completive aspect and the use of a protruded tongue for the negative completive. The completive can also occur with pointing signs, thus treating them on a par with other predicatives. The incompletive marker appears also to be used as a negation marker by some but not all signers, which might reflect an ongoing process of grammaticalisation. Second, I describe the use of a pursed lip marker for the expression of intensification, and how its meaning arises from an interaction with the manual component to which it is attached. Third, I show the use of spread lips as an interjection expressing moral judgement, which also seems to be used by hearing non-signers across Bali. Finally, I touch upon the use of the stiffened upperlip that might function as an epistemic marker. All in all, while speech-related mouthings appear to be uncommon in Kata Kolok, the mouth is a crucial articulator that plays a role at various levels of language structure